The Samsung Galaxy S8 is arguably the best looking smartphone ever made. It is definitely a candidate for the best looking smartphone of 2017. However, all that comes with one big caveat. The Galaxy S8 is built with glass on both sides and a metal frame, meaning there’s seemingly more to break. From our personal experience, Samsung’s design has improved from the Galaxy S6 Edge to now, but glass is still glass, right? Well, we can either speculate how durable the Galaxy S8 is or simply go ahead and find out. Or at least YouTube's JerryRigEverything can.
The YouTuber bought a Galaxy S8 and put it through some extreme torture tests, simulating “two years” of wear and tear in minutes. JerryRigEverything scratched, burned and bent the device and here’s what they found.
The channel says Gorilla Glass 5 offers expected levels of scratch resistance, enough to keep the phone safe from coins and keys. That’s a welcome development for regular users, although the channel doesn’t really call it shock proof. You weren’t expecting that either, were you? The YouTuber says “it took several hard hits with my knife” to break the back panel. However, when it did break, it spider-webbed instead of disintegrating into shards of glass.
Perhaps the most interesting bit of JerryRigEverything’s tests is what he calls the Apocalypse test. The YouTuber took a lighter to the Galaxy S8’s display, with a concentrated burn for 30 seconds. He noted that the Galaxy S8 was more resistant to this test than its predecessors. The phone’s display turns white and then returns to normal the first two times, getting a permanent white burn mark on the third try.
The channel isn’t very disappointed with the Galaxy S8’s durability, but practically speaking, they’re not really warning you off a case either. That just seems to be the tragedy of the Galaxy S8. It’s the best looking smartphone whose design is always going to be hidden.